Cloud ERP firm FinancialForce that runs on Salesforce's platform raises $110M
FinancialForce raises $110 million in funding — Summary:The cloud ERP player is now hitting an annual revenue run rate of about $50 million and plans to spend the dough on product development, sales and various corporate functions.
Context & Ripple Effects
FinancialForce is betting that ERP can be built entirely as a native app on someone else's platform rather than on owned infrastructure, and investors just put $110M behind that bet with the company at roughly $50M in annual run-rate revenue. The raise lands weeks before Vlocity's $42M round led by Salesforce Ventures — evidence that backing 'built-on-Salesforce' application vendors was becoming a repeatable venture thesis, not a one-off.
The arc continues after this article: FinancialForce later brings in former Heroku CEO and Salesforce EVP Tod Nielsen as chief executive with $193M raised to date, while Copado's $96M Series B shows the same platform-native playbook spreading from ERP into DevOps tooling.
First-order effects
- FinancialForce gets fresh capital earmarked for product development, sales and corporate functions, letting it push past its ~$50M run rate while staying locked to Salesforce's platform roadmap.
- Salesforce gains another well-funded flagship ISV proving its Platform can carry heavyweight workloads like ERP — a reference sale for convincing other enterprises to build on it.
Second-order effects
- Competing ERP incumbents face rivals whose infrastructure costs are effectively outsourced to Salesforce, shifting competition toward vertical functionality and customer workflow rather than data-center scale.
- Investors' willingness to fund successive platform-native firms (Vlocity, then Copado) pushes more venture dollars toward the Salesforce ecosystem layer, where Salesforce Ventures itself participates as both landlord and backer.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise applications stratify into platform owners and platform-dependent app vendors — durable economics for the platform, but strategic dependence (and acquisition risk) for every vendor built on top.
- ERP's center of gravity moves from monolithic on-premise suites toward cloud modules assembled around a CRM core, eroding the traditional boundary between back-office and front-office systems.
The trend: Enterprise software is consolidating around platform ecosystems, with venture capital increasingly funding application vendors built natively on a handful of hyperscale clouds.